Ellan's Nonwoven
I have been interested in creating textile materials with electronic properties or techniques that somehow exploit an ironic quality traditionally associated with fibrous materials. I was familiar with felting and paper-making techniques, but had never fused plastic bags together. I especially liked the idea of using reclaimed materials as well as creating something which could be translucent, easy to fabricate, durable and water resistant. The intention of this nonwoven material was to mimic the look of fibers under a microscope - a random assembly of overlapping fibers fixed under glass. In this case the materials were clear produce bags from Trader Joe's and conductive metallic thread ("bad") from the lab. In order for the threads to acts as effective conductors they must remain isolated from each other - this was accomplished by shielding each thread by layers of plastic bags. Although they appear to be a random group of overlapping threads, crossing and intersecting, they are actually isolated by the plastic layers. Free ends of each thread are available at each end to connect to devices as necessary. The ends of each thread were marked with corresponding symbols.
Lessons learned:
As you would expect, sometimes the plastic melts more around the conductive threads. To make sure that these were consistently surrounded by plastic I put more layers of bags around the these sections after they were fixed into position.
Not all plastic bags are created equal - In class I had experimented with light green produce bags, which for some reason were much easier to work with than the clear ones. I layered pieces of brown and black bags to mimic the look of a woven textile structure at high magnification. The brown bags were especially sensitive to heat and shrunk significantly, whereas the green produce bags maintained a much more even texture.